As social media is an open platform, ordinary people have been given the press tools needed to report news and spread information, both legitimate and fake. As users of the internet, we have the power of citizen journalism.
Citizen journalism is collecting and reporting data from non-traditional sources or the public via social media, government platforms, and traditional news outlets.
Without citizen journalism, individuals would still be being fed heavily censored, biased information by legacy media outlets. This is defined as the Gatekeeping theory. Gatekeeping content is defined as the filtration of content, where persons working for legacy media outlets categorise what they believe to be media, news and unimportant information.
Having both citizen journalism as well as a distributed network allows for more information to flow freely to the public, without the risk of getting censored.
Leave a Reply